


a little of the collapsing space

by ohtempora



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Drug Abuse, Episode Tag, M/M, Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:07:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24231085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohtempora/pseuds/ohtempora
Summary: “I’m not gonna say you should have told me,” Stewy says. “You absolutely should not have told me fucking anything."
Relationships: Stewy Hosseini/Kendall Roy
Comments: 12
Kudos: 105





	a little of the collapsing space

**Author's Note:**

> spent all of finals watching succession; just watched the s2 finale today and oh man, i am having a lot of feelings about kendall roy, our number one boy. and then i saw this [gifset](https://thegoblincities.tumblr.com/post/614878277820104704/arian-moayed-on-the-look-stewy-gives-kendall) and had even more feelings, so, you know. title from the national because of all the sad boys. 
> 
> trying to write canonesque dialogue for this was ridiculous! they say fuck a lot! there are too many em-dashes! i hope it makes sense! also, very very brief context: CDIG - criminal defense and investigations group. V10 law firms - have lawyers to do that shit and charge $1300/hr for the privilege. it's ok tho, kendall can afford it.

Stewy texts him at one in the morning after the press conference. 

Kendall is in his living room. He’s alone. He’s sitting hunched over his iPad. He’s cutting lines of coke on the glass surface of the screen. 

There are a lot of unanswered messages filling up his notifications. Roman and Shiv, Greek chorus variations on _what the fuck_. Naomi, asking if he’s alright. Rava, a message he couldn’t even bear to look at, pushed out of sight with a flick of his thumb. His personal attorney emailed. His tax guys called. There are messages from the partners of four separate V10 law firms to look at tomorrow, white collar CDIG brawlers for when his dad tries to fuck him and Congress tries to get another piece of him. He left Greg in his own apartment with some park coke and told him to order fucking takeout. 

Greg, in the car on the way back from the press conference. “You — I mean, I think — that was brave, you know, getting up there, in that way, where you did that. Uh. Yeah. Doing the right thing. Doing it.”

Kendall sighed at him and told him not to talk to anyone who wasn’t his lawyer — “I don’t, I don’t have that? A lawyer? Was I supposed to hire one before we had the press conference, because, uh, the lead time? I didn’t, uh, acquire counsel?” — told him he’d be getting a call in the morning from a lawyer, and don’t open the fucking door to anyone who wasn’t the delivery guy with his dinner. 

He got home and he threw up. He drank some water and threw that up too. He turned off his phone for an hour to have a beer, got something harder when it hit him, in waves. 

Stewy doesn’t ask him what the fuck he just did. Doesn’t ask why. Stewy texts him a single fucking question mark, and Kendall laughs at loud at the bizarre, crashing relief, his voice echoing harshly around the corners of his giant fucking apartment. 

He hits call. Stewy picks up on the first ring. “Wow,” he says. “My exclusive interview with America’s Most Wanted. Kendall fucking Roy, ladies and gents. Fresh off a trophy kill, in front of cameras to boot.” 

“Hey,” Kendall says. “Uh. Hey.”

There’s some residue on his iPad. He swipes it up and gums the coke. He’s clear, he’s okay. He's fine. 

“You know, Ken,” Stewy says, and stops. He’s gotta still be in Paxos. It must be morning for him. “I don’t — I don’t know what to fucking say to you right now, man.”

“I mean,” Kendall says. “I couldn’t—”

“I’m not gonna say you should have told me,” Stewy says. “You absolutely should not have told me anything. Absolutely not, man. You know, with — when your dad said the board seat, I thought, fuck, man.” 

“I thought you were pissed at me.”

“Sure,” Stewy says. “Sure, yeah. And I’m actually calling to fucking thank you, bro, on behalf of all the shareholder calls I’m going to make when it’s morning in New York, when the clip of you calling your dad a malignant presence is playing on every TV in every airport across America. But are you, are you, you high right now? You—”

“Not that much,” Kendall says. “You know—”

“Dude,” Stewy says, and cuts himself off. Not too much. Kendall spent four years of college sharing with him anything they could pay for to smoke or snort. Kendall knows he knows. 

“You’re gonna call Waystar shareholders tomorrow,” Kendall says. “I’m gonna call my fucking lawyers.”

“I’m positive they’ll thank God for the blessing of all the billable hours you’re about to bestow them with.”

Another silence. Kendall exhales. He thinks, maybe the adrenaline hasn’t worn off. In the morning it’ll hit him. Or he’ll do some more lines, stay up until seven AM, make it so he can’t dream about flashbulbs, water, Logan’s goddamn face. 

“Are you, like.” Stewy coughs. “I’m so mad at you right now, Ken.” 

“I thought it was corporate shit,” Kendall says. “I thought it wasn’t personal. I thought it was money, bro. Thought that was the deal.”

“Sure, yeah. I’m gonna make those calls later. I just—”

“Are you calling me as a fucking friend?” Kendall asks. “You checking in on me, Stew? That what this is, a late night wellness check?”

“Okay,” Stewy says. “Okay. Wellness check, yeah. Hey, I’m not the one who stabbed my dad in the fucking back today. Feel good, huh? When you twisted the knife?”

“No,” Kendall says. “Jesus Christ, no, it did—” he stops. “I’m not going to say this to you.”

“Anything you say can and will be used against you,” Stewy agrees. “Look. I wanted to call, I wanted to make sure that you — I didn’t think you were going to pick up the phone for anyone in your fucking family, and I’ll happily fuck off and go back to convincing my girlfriend I can buy her molly and pay for her trip to Burning Man without us getting engaged about it.” 

“Good luck with that,” Kendall says. He hits speaker on his phone and reaches for the water bottle on the floor, gulps some down. “If. If I—”

“You can’t ask if you can trust me right now,” Stewy says. There’s something gone oddly gentle in his voice and it fucking stings. “You can’t, Ken, you know that.”

“I wasn’t going to ask that.” He doesn’t know what he was going to say. If he asked, would Stewy come down, sit in the apartment in the dark and do lines with him. Goad him into talking, the way he used to during their freshman year at Harvard, before Kendall pushed past every limit of being fucked up he’d managed to set. When it was the two of them sneaking onto the roof of their dorm, splitting a joint. Two private school fucks and Kendall talking and talking, only to Stewy, only in the dark.

“Was it the board seat?” Stewy asks. “He offered your board seat, man. Like, we sat there and I watched him jam his dick in like that, you know, all fucked.”

“It wasn’t the board seat.” Wasn’t only the board seat. Kendall taps some more coke out of the baggie and grabs his credit card, thinks, one more for the rest of this conversation. “It was just the truth.”

The problem is the coke makes him want to talk, and Stewy makes him want to talk, and Stewy’s still trying to take over the company. _Can I trust you? No._ Kendall’s going to do one more line and then he’s going to get off the phone and tell Stewy to go back to blowing off his fucking girlfriend. There should be someone else in the room with him. Naomi. Not Rava. It would have been awful to have Greg here with him right now, but it might be worse to be alone. 

“I watched the clip of the press conference like ten times,” Stewy says. “And you know what, Ken? All I could think about? That weekend senior year where we flew out to fucking Napa, and I looked at you, I thought, Jesus, this poor guy is even more fucked up than I fucking thought.”

“When in Napa did you think that?” Kendall asks. “When you were literally pouring champagne straight into my mouth, or when we were getting fucked up in the basement of a winery?”

When it was the two of them, careless, acting like no one could see what they did. Kendall remembers getting drunk on that trip, remembers getting high. Remembers Stewy touching him carefully before telling him to take a bump. 

“Somewhere in between the two,” Stewy says. Kendall can’t stand the weight in his voice. He leans forward over the iPad and takes a breath. 

“It’s been twenty years,” Stewy says. “Longer.” There are faint clinking noises, like he’s poured himself a drink. “I, uh. Don’t stay up too late, man.” 

Kendall sniffs, licks his lower lip. He doesn’t say, I’d like to see you. Doesn’t say, I could be on your side again. Doesn’t say, I’m sorry I didn’t warn you. Stewy’s a corporate snake-skinned motherfucker; Stewy understands that last one. And any apology could only be worth so much, when it’s weighed against shares and the company going private, the taste of blood in your mouth. 

“I’ll try,” Kendall says instead. “Okay, Stew. Thanks for — for calling. I won’t.” He looks at his phone, thinks about hanging up. “Enjoy the rest of your vacation, okay? Paxos. Enjoy it.”

“Ken,” Stewy says, one last time, and it’s a long time before he says anything else. “Alright. Yeah.”

He says goodnight, so quiet that Kendall almost doesn’t hear it, and then he hangs up. 

Kendall does one more line, then another. He looks back at his phone. There’s more shit pouring in. Social media, late-night articles getting ready to hit the morning headlines, more messages from more people. He stares at Stewy’s text again, the question mark, and then he turns his phone off.

The morning’s the morning. It won’t be like yesterday, when he woke up and he knew, wrapped in the truth of it, what he was going to do. 

Everyone gets ruined in the end. He goes to his bedroom. He lies down. He doesn’t sleep. 


End file.
